Bureaucratic colonial rule favored informal secrecy over defined policy.

Evidence

Cromer started by recognizing that “personal influence” without a legal or written political treaty could be enough for “sufficiently effective supervision over public affairs” in foreign countries. This kind of informal influence was preferable to a well-defined policy because it could be altered at a moment’s notice and did not necessarily involve the home government in case cf difficulties. It required a highly trained, highly reliable staff whose loyalty and patriotism were not connected with personal ambition or vanity and who would even be required to renounce the human aspiration of having their names connected with their achievements. Their greatest passion would have to be for secrecy (“the less British officials are talked about the better”), for a role behind the scenes; their greatest contempt would be directed at publicity and people who love it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 551

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines the operational ethos of the bureaucrat: personal influence, secrecy, self-erasure — the toolkit concept of colonial bureaucracy.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s scaffolding on how modern bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion; also prefigures the ‘man behind the scenes’ and administrative anonymity themes.

Related

• Imperial informal influence beat treaties by remaining flexible and hidden (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Colonial privilege operated through sanctioned refusal to witness rather than surveillance #complicates (0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1390
• Colonial authority pre-emptively silences the colonized’s own testimony #complicates (0.70) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 111